TEXAS PROSECUTOR FATALLY SHOT

On same day, Ga. student wounded; Ariz. gunman found

KAUFMAN, Texas 
An assistant district attorney was shot and killed Thursday morning near the north Texas courthouse where he worked, and authorities said they were searching through his cases to try to find clues about why he may have been targeted.

And in Georgia, a student opened fire at his middle school Thursday afternoon, wounding a 14-year-old in the neck before an armed officer working at the school was able to get the gun away, police said.

The shootings came one day after an attorney in Arizona was killed in his office and amid increased concern about gun violence after a gunman shot and killed 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut school last month, sparking a heated national debate over gun control. On Thursday in Washington, Vice President Joe Biden met with Senate Democrats to brief the caucus about the rationale behind the administration’s recommendations on guns, arguing that, in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shooting, the nation “will not understand if we don’t act.”

Biden spoke as some U.S. senators have begun to move toward agreement on at least one part of the gun package pushed by President Barack Obama — a measure to tighten the current system of background checks for gun purchases. Included in the president’s proposals is a ban on assault weapons.

In Texas, assistant district attorney Mark Hasse, 57, had exited his vehicle in the parking lot behind the Kaufman County Courthouse annex and was walking toward the building when a masked gunman shot him multiple times just before 9 a.m., Kaufman County authorities said.

His assailants were at large as of Thursday night. Hasse was head of the district attorney’s organized crime unit in Kaufman, a town of about 8,000 people 35 miles southeast of Dallas. The shooting occurred on the same day the U.S. Department of Justice said in an unrelated statement that the Kaufman County District Attorney’s Office was helping to investigate the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, a gang that was established within the 1980s in the Texas prison system.

In Atlanta, multiple shots were fired in the courtyard of Price Middle School south of downtown around 1:50 p.m. and the one boy was hit, said Atlanta police. A teacher received minor cuts, police said. The wounded boy was to be released Thursday night.

Police swarmed the school of about 400 students after reports of the shooting while a crowd of anxious parents gathered in the streets, awaiting word on their children. Investigators believe the shooting wasn’t random and something occurred between the two students that may have led to it.

Also Thursday, Arthur Douglas Harmon, who shot and killed a call-center CEO and critically wounded a lawyer at a Phoenix office building where they were meeting to discuss a contract dispute, was found dead, ending a nearly 24-hour manhunt that had area residents on edge. A landscaper found Harmon’s body among some bushes in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa. Harmon, 70, died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.

A handgun was found near his body, and a rented Kia Optima sedan he drove from Wednesday’s shooting scene was located nearby.

Authorities had been searching for Harmon since Wednesday morning, when they say he drew a gun and shot two men at the end of a mediation session at a north-central Phoenix office building.